Unfortunately, Jardin does not suggest a reason for the inauthenticity he no doubt accurately observed. It is telling that the incident he recounts began in the green room of a TV studio, because TV, I think, has a lot to do with the phenomenon. The cost of a momentary slip has risen dramatically, because TV erodes the distance between political actors and spectators. In fostering a false intimacy, it also promotes an unreasonable confidence in spectators that they can judge at a distance the true character of actors they do not know intimately, whom they know only as performers, actors in the stage sense as well as the political sense. An actor who allows his mask to drop risks creating the illusion that the unmasked personality is more real than the masked one. This is not necessarily the case. The recited lines of the script may be the carefully composed, elaborately reasoned, far-sighted judgment of the role's creator, truer perhaps than the spontaneous sally that is mistakenly judged to be more authentic because less scripted. What Jardin is judging here, really, is not authenticity vs. inauthenticity but rather a standard of performance, in which he finds Peillon wanting. He is a poor actor; he cannot carry conviction though playing his own part.

Earlier in the essay, Jardin praises Charles de Gaulle as a more authentic incarnation of power. But de Gaulle was in fact a consummate performer, who never let his character lapse. It would be a mistake to measure his performance in terms of authenticity. It was a calculated act by an actor more skilled at ruse than Vincent Peillon.

4 comments:

A very sensible analysis, indeed. It's not the first time Alexandre Jardin seems not to understand the nature of power — his "Agence des bonnes pratiques" was another nice but vain attempt to "make the good shine".

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I have been a student and observer of French politics since 1968. In that time I've translated more than 130 books from the French, including Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. I chair the seminar for visiting scholars at Harvard's Center for European Studies and am a member of the editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society and of The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville. You can read some of my writing on French politics and history here and a short bio here. From time to time I will include posts by other students of France and French politics (accessible via the index link "guest"). My hope is that this site will become a gathering place for all who are interested in discussing and analyzing political life in France. You can keep track of posts on Twitter by following "artgoldhammer".